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Many Americans were horrified to learn that US-grown technology firms are complying with the Chinese government's demands to control information. But the mistake some observers make is to equate the power of corporations with the power of governments. Though Google's success stems from its birth in a free country, that doesn't mean the company is strong enough to enforce freedom around the world.Posted ontechliberation.comSonia Arrison, director of technology studies, Pacific Research Institute

Out of This Blogosphere

In the short term, the blogosphere will remain the largest galaxy in the social media universe. But a number of others (YouTube, digg, myspace) have rapidly risen to prominence, and Technorati does little to help mine and track these galaxies of consumer-generated media. So there is a burgeoning need for tools that cement all of the content we want to track into a unified interface. If you're placing bets in this space, keep your eye on the expanding universe.Posted onmicropersuasion.comSteve Rubel, senior VP, Edelman

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It's day two of the World's Fastest Drummer contest in Anaheim, California, and Tim "the Missile" Yeung looks worried. He's watching a middle-aged British jazz percussionist blaze through a 60-second bass-drum roll while a device called the Drumometer counts every thump.

The Missile - a 27-year-old with long, dark hair and prominent facial piercings - has kept the beat for death metal bands like Hate Eternal, Vital Remains, and Decrepit Birth and has a reputation as a man with fast feet. His bass-drum rampages on songs such as "Saturated in Dejection" and "Nailed to Obscurity" have won him a fanatical following. In the preliminary rounds he maxed out at 865 thumps in the allotted 60 seconds, good enough, he hopes, for the finals. But now a balding jazz hound might out-drum him. Then he'd really be saturated in dejection.

The contest is the brainchild of Boo McAfee, a genial, bearded 50-year-old and former drummer for Willie Nelson. McAfee had always wanted to know who was the fastest drummer ever - Buddy Rich, Barrett Deems, Jim Chapin? - and had tinkered with developing a drumbeat-counting machine for some 25 years. In 1999, McAfee took on Craig Alan, an electrical engineer, as a drumming student. After a lesson one day, Alan noticed one of McAfee's design scribblings. The teacher soon discovered his pupil's area of expertise and asked him if a device could be built to count drum taps reliably. Three months later, Alan debuted the Drumometer, a palm-sized black box wired to sensors that attach to a drum. An LED display shows the number of taps.

The Drumometer uncovered a deep well of competitiveness. In 2000, a country-hip hop drummer out of Nashville named Johnny Rabb became the first person to break 1,000 taps in 60 seconds, claiming the title World's Fastest Hands and recognition from the recordkeepers at Guinness. McAfee and Alan placed ads in Drum! and Modern Drummer magazines touting Rabb's accomplishment and their $100 device. They created new classes of speed drumming: fastest feet (for two-footed bass drumming), bare hands, and tag team, among others. Orders flowed in, and the race to top Rabb began.

Musical genres - death metal, country, jazz, screamo - have battled for dominance in the various categories. This year, the Missile is death metal's best hope in the fastest-feet championship. The event, staged on the floor of the International Music Products Association show at the Anaheim Convention Center, is jammed between slick displays of the newest guitars, pianos, trumpets, and drums. A wild mishmash of punks, metalheads, mods, cowboys, and concert pianists mill around, waiting for the next round to begin.

Some in the crowd don't see the point of the contest. "It offends me musically," declares Jim Gifford, a rock-soul drummer from Chicago. "The last time I played a 60-second nonstop drum roll was never. It emphasizes the wrong thing."

But a teenage boy from nearby Newport Beach gets it. "It's awesome," he says. "It's like a videogame."

Predictably, youth consistently grabs the spotlight. (Rabb, after all, is only 34.) The brightest moment came in 2002, when 21-year-old Jotan Afanador managed a then-record 1,123 taps in 60 seconds. His secret: a style he invented called "shakin vibration," in which the tapping of his drumsticks is almost imperceptible.

Being barely perceptible is not the Missile's forte. He assaults the bass drum, pummeling it into submission. In the final round, he blasts his way to 872 thumps. When it's over, he walks off the stage gingerly, his face pale. No one can best him. He wins the Battle of the Feet by 52 thumps, and fans flock around him.

"Dude, that was sick drumming," says one. "You're incredible. I loved your work with Hate Eternal." The Missile smiles wanly and sits down as fast as he can.

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"This rock is basically a battery," Friedemann Freund says, tapping a 3-foot chunk of granite. To demonstrate his point, he's placed the rock in a refrigerator-sized steel press and attached wires to copper electrodes on either end. The touch of a button drops 20,000 pounds of pressure on the block, sending a few nanoamps of current through the wires.

His rock battery may be too weak to power a flashlight, but Freund - a white-haired physics professor who divides his time among San Jose State University, the SETI Institute, and NASA - is thinking bigger. Multiply the experiment over a few miles of rock, add the pressure around a seismic fault that's about to snap, and, Freund figures, you'd get an electric signal that could be used to predict earthquakes.

April 18 marked the centennial of the great San Francisco quake, yet despite 100 years and countless seismological studies, there's still no reliable method of earthquake prediction. Investigations into supposed omens - unusual lights, radio noise, bizarre animal behavior - have all proven to be dead ends. As a result, earthquake scientists have largely abandoned the quest for a short-term warning system.

Not Freund, who's a mineralogist by training. Twenty years ago, after a decade of studying how negatively charged oxygen ions conduct current, he devised the stone-pinching experiments to determine whether rocks might produce the same phenomenon. "We used to crush the rocks," he says, pointing to a mound of rubble. "We thought we really had to go in for the kill. Now we just squeeze."

The mainstream seismology community is skeptical about Freund's theories. But he's found a champion in a Palo Alto, California, company called QuakeFinder that's working to determine whether actual seismic events replicate Freund's lab discoveries. Founded by satellite engineer Tom Bleier, QuakeFinder aims to use a mix of underground and satellite sensors to detect tremor-related currents by pinpointing the electromagnetic signals and atmospheric changes they generate. The company has already buried 70 sensors in seismically active areas across California.

In 2003, QuakeFinder partnered with Lockheed Martin to launch a miniature satellite designed to detect low-frequency changes in the ionosphere. The satellite - which cost about $1 million to build, shoot into orbit, and operate - lost both batteries within several months but collected more than 2 gigs of data. Now Bleier's seeking funding for the next-gen version. He admits that a practical warning system will require a decade of research, several longer-lasting satellite batteries, and tens of millions of dollars. First, QuakeFinder needs data. Ground sensors recorded intriguing signals in the hours before a magnitude 6 earthquake in the California desert in 2004. But it'll take an even bigger quake to confirm whether the crew is onto something. "Nothing may happen until we have a Katrina-like disaster," Bleier says. "Then everybody will ask, Why weren't we doing more research on this?"

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"I think I'm gonna throw up," I blurt. I'm standing in the middle of the Halfpipe, three adjacent 20-foot screens bursting with a dizzying 160-degree panorama of the first-person shooter Halo 2. As the soldier on the display crisscrosses the rugged terrain of an alien world, my legs begin to wobble and I have to sit down. "Sometimes when we do demos, I look at the person next to me and see their head down as they try not to vomit," laughs Torrey McPheters, my guide and the director of gaming technology for Holodek, an arcade in Hampton, New Hampshire.

Tucked away in an office building within a nondescript industrial park, Holodek's six-room facility houses 32 gaming stations, all of them presently occupied. "Wall Street thought no one would leave their house to play videogames," says Holodek's president, Kit McKittrick. Players ages 13 to 30 fork over $6 an hour to get their game on with equipment your average button-masher won't find at home.

Onscreen, zombies slash Counter-Strike soldiers, sorcerers cast spells in World of Warcraft, and virtual gods manipulate townspeople in Black & White 2. Each station has a keyboard, mouse, and headset tethered to a PC and an Xbox, and all of them are networked and ready for online play. Twenty of the stations are rigged with individual projectors that screen any of 400 games. There's also a scaled-down version of the Halfpipe, featuring three 6-foot foam core boards mounted side by side. Both Halfpipes rely on a trio of Xboxes to gather visual info on different views in the game and feed it to three projectors, each pointing at a board.

Scanning one of the rooms, I spot Greg, 17, kicking and punching his way through Dead or Alive 3, an arcade-style fighting game. I ask if he'd like a sparring partner. As soon as I sit down, the kid next to me warns, "That's the only game he'll play." "That's not true," Greg retorts. "I'll play DOA2." Twenty minutes later, as the game announces my 15-to-0 ass-whupping, I tell Greg my thumbs are too sore to go on.

The full-size Halfpipe is located behind an employees-only door, in a 4,000-square-foot warehouse that acts as the company's R&D lab. There, McPheters also shows me the Sphere, whose interior is lined with a 360-degree screen. In the center sits a cockpit on robotic stilts, a simulator on 'roids - tilting, spinning, and rumbling whoever dares take a seat. If your car spins out in Midnight Club, you will, too - and see your world flash before your eyes across the curved walls of the Sphere.

The Halfpipe and the Sphere are in beta, as is Holodek itself. If all goes as planned, a second center will open in the Southeast this year, offering the supersize systems. Bring your own Dramamine.

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A dead godwit is not much to look at. Scrawny and brown, with too much beak, the bird would not be fit to decorate your grandmother's Sunday hat. Yet I'm feeling slightly giddy in the presence of the specimen Carla Dove has just lifted from a drawer. Tied to its feet are several cardboard tags, the oldest of which, dated 1837, bears the handwritten name Charles Darwin. "It's the most famous bird in our collection," Dove says, breaking into a proud smile, "the only one in the country shot by Darwin himself."

Dove is a researcher at the Smithsonian Institution, where there's no shortage of feathered celebrities, including the world's last passenger pigeon. In all, between 625,000 and 640,000 specimens occupy the back rooms of the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History. Records - classified using old-fashioned Linnaean systematics - are kept in ledgers and card catalogs. Skins are frequently checked out by researchers, "like library books," Dove says.

This is pretty much the way taxonomy has been practiced since Darwin's day. The number of known species has grown exponentially, yet the work of identifying and classifying them has remained the hands-on domain of specialists like Dove. But the Smithsonian is becoming the world headquarters of a new kind of taxonomy, accessible to anyone with a DNA sequencer, an Internet connection, and basic computer literacy.

Only three years old, the Consortium for the Barcode of Life has attracted researchers at universities and natural history museums in more than 40 countries. The project's goal is to sequence the same segment of DNA from as many organisms as participants can find. The result will be a "barcode of life" that will uniquely identify each of the 10 million to 15 million species - from birds and mammals to cyanobacteria and slime molds - believed to live on Earth.

In 2002, University of Guelph geneticist Paul Hebert settled on a specific 648-base-pair fragment of DNA because, he realized, it had the virtue of varying greatly among species but minimally among the individuals within them. Hebert's segment is a stretch of mitochondrial DNA in subunit I of the cytochrome c oxidase gene, already used in isolated classification schemes (such as shrimp taxonomy) but never before tried as a common standard. "The idea of a universal diagnostic has been a holy grail since people began naming species," says David Schindel, who, as executive secretary, oversees the consortium from behind a broad desk at the museum. "But it has proven impossible - until now."

The nuts and bolts of the work fall to Lee Weigt, chief of the Smithsonian's barcode-identification effort. He's busy these days trying to sequence the world's 10,000 or so bird species as part of the project's pilot program. He shows me his latest DNA analysis equipment, installed at a Smithsonian laboratory a short drive from the museum, while talking about price and volume with the precision of a factory manager. "On three machines, we can process 6,000 samples a week for about $2 apiece, but the total cost of the machines is over half a million dollars," he says, taking a quick breath. "Without the high tech robotics, it could cost up to $5 a sample, and you can do only hundreds a week."

With Schindel's leadership and Weigt's savvy, the project will likely extract a barcode from every bird species by its 2010 target date. And a universal barcode of life, at an estimated cost of $1 billion, is possible in the next decade. Which raises a host of interesting questions: Will taxonomy become merely a branch of genetics? What will scientists do with the broad surveys of biodiversity made possible by the barcoding project? Will biologists bother going into the field when they can gather so much practical information from a database?

Dove and I look again at Darwin's godwit, as if it might resolve these issues. The barcode starts off like all the others: "CCTATACCTAATCTTCGGCGCATGAGCTGGTATAGT." But the dead bird remains silent.

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There's a rumor going around the Internet that Douglas Coupland collects meteorites. Nobody knows how it began, least of all Coupland. But the story started to circulate shortly after his first novel, Generation X, became an On the Road for the '90s. Every effort he's made to set the record straight has been ignored by his many fan sites. So he recently decided to purchase a few choice specimens.

I'm visiting with Coupland at his home in Vancouver, British Columbia, to discuss his novel JPod, coming out in May, when I notice a meteorite the size of a grapefruit resting on a table beside a whale vertebra. In a voice raspy from drinking late into the night before, he informs me that the meteorite was found in Argentina, and that it's very rare. He cradles the rock in his hand. "We should all be so lucky to have people throw such good ideas our way," he says.

Collecting meteorites isn't the only concept Coupland has cribbed from the Web gossip about him in the past couple of years. "There's this whole meta-Doug out there who's no longer connected to me or even cares about me anymore," he says.

So for JPod, he created a character called Douglas Coupland, based on his online doppelgänger: a one-dimensional egotist with cold eyes resembling "wells filled with drowned toddlers." This Coupland first intrudes on the action when the narrator - Ethan Jarlewski, a game designer working for a lightly fictionalized Electronic Arts - meets him on a plane to China. Coupland is ostensibly writing an article for Wired on "designer prisoner-of-conscience labor," but he's secretly developing a gadget and, not incidentally, looking to poach programmers from Electronic Arts.

When Coupland started writing JPod, a 21st-century sibling to his 1995 novel, Microserfs, he didn't anticipate any of this. "It really shocked me to appear in the story," he confesses as he leads me to the dining room for lunch.

But now Coupland seems to delight in stalking his meta-Doug in fiction and mimicking him in life: For lunch he serves cold cuts on white bread with yellow mustard - and asparagus from a jar, which he swears is a delicacy on the Canadian NATO base in Germany where he was born. It's a spread that could easily have been concocted by a Coupland fan as a parody of his Gen X pop culture sensibility. We don't discuss it. Instead, he tells me about his plans to graft material from his novel onto the Vancouver landscape. Most immediately, he wants to create the world's biggest Tetris game by rigging the lights of an abandoned high-rise to flash on and off in the windows at night, controlled by a modified game console. "I'm better than most people at asking, What would happen if ?" he says, "and then going out and trying it."

Before becoming a writer, Coupland was a sculptor and conceptual artist, which helps explain some of the more unconventional passages in JPod. For example, the text is periodically interrupted by listing the ingredients of Doritos, or reproducing the Chinese characters for Internet browsing and pornography. It's a strategy of cultural critique-by-appropriation that he likens to pop art. In fact, he will be exhibiting large-scale reproductions of some of the book's pages at a Canadian art gallery.

As he serves scoops of vanilla ice cream for dessert, Coupland appears more excited by the exhibit than by JPod's upcoming publication. But of course, the real show will be on the Web, as Coupland and meta-Doug appropriate each other and morph into one. "It's all out there now," he says. "I'll never have to do an interview again."

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Imagine if tire manufacturers lobbied against filling potholes so they could sell more tires. Or if private emergency services got local agencies to cut funding for fire departments so people would end up calling private services first. And what if private schools pushed to reduce public school money so more families would flee the public system? Or what if taxicab companies managed to get a rail line placed just far enough from an airport to make public transportation prohibitively inconvenient? Pick your favorite of these outrages, and take note of how it makes you feel. You'll experience it again when you read the next story - and this one, unfortunately, is true.

In 2005, the state of California conducted an experiment. Hoping to make paying taxes easier, it launched a pilot program for people who were likely to file "simple returns." The state already had the payroll information some taxpayers needed to file their returns, so it filled out 50,000 of those forms for them. Way in advance of the filing deadline, the state mailed the taxpayers their completed ReadyReturns. Like a Visa statement, the ReadyReturn itemized the taxes due, making the process easier for the taxpayer and more accurate for the government. People could either file the ReadyReturn or use the information to fill out forms on their own. Of taxpayers who hadn't yet filed, 30 percent used the return; more than 95 percent of that group said they would do so again. Praise for the program was generally over-the-top.

Soon after ReadyReturn was launched, lobbyists from the tax-preparation industry began to pressure California lawmakers to abandon the innovation. Their opposition was not surprising: If figuring out your taxes were easy, why would anyone bother to hire H&R Block? If the government sends you a completed form, why buy TurboTax?

But what is surprising is that their "arguments" are having an effect. In February, the California Republican caucus released a report highlighting its "concerns" about the program - for example, that an effort to make taxes more efficient "violates the proper role of government." Soon thereafter, a Republican state senator introduced a bill to stop the ReadyReturn program.

Inefficiency has become a virtue in government - and not just in California. Last year, the US Senate passed a funding bill with an amendment prohibiting the IRS from developing its own "income tax electronic filing or preparation products or services."

I'm no Republican (though I was the youngest member of the Pennsylvania delegation to the 1980 GOP convention). But I don't expect the Democrats would behave much differently if they were in power; the corrupting influence of money in government is equal-opportunity. If those in power are to resist that corruption, they need to adhere to a set of ideals. The GOP (at least, as it was rising to dominate American politics) defined its ideals as pro-market policies that promote competition and efficiency. Yet increasingly, the party - as conservative columnist Bruce Bartlett says of George Bush in his book, Impostor - is "incapable of telling the difference between being pro-business and being for the free market." It favors specific competitors rather than favoring competition. What's good for the US is more and more often translated into what's good for powerful friends. Or so policy in America could be summarized today.

Such pro-business and anti-efficiency policies will continue to prevail until someone in our political system begins to articulate principles on the other side. And given the way money talks in capitals around the country, this is a stance only those out of power can afford to take.

Free markets aren't pro-business - they don't favor incumbent companies if upstarts do the job better. Competition is good wherever it comes from - even the government - so long as it lowers social costs and increases wealth. And efficiency is good regardless of who it might hurt; it is especially good if it hurts those who feed off inefficiency. Thus, lawyers are good, but a world that needed fewer of them would be much better. Doctors are great, but that's no argument against better health. And TurboTax is fantastic, but it shouldn't prevent the government from making paying taxes easier.